How to review your 2021 digital content

Fresh starts make all the difference. At the start of a new week, month, or year, we’re more likely to achieve our goals.

 

So, as we enter 2022, it’s worth investing time now to look back on our digital content – figuring out worked and what didn’t over the last year – so that we can create smart goals for the year ahead.

 

 

Why review your digital content?

 

Reviewing your digital content helps you:

• See what worked well, so you can do more of it
• See what didn’t, so you can do less of it

It’s not just about the content. You can also:

• Assess how you’re spending your team’s time, energy, and money
• Identify risks and opportunities for the year ahead
• Check if your workflows, roles, and guidelines are aligned
• Refresh the connection between your content and the wider organisational strategy
• Spot gaps in your content strategy, so you can adjust or reimagine it
• Celebrate your achievements, boost morale, and give credit where it’s due

 

How do you review your digital content?

 

When you’re reviewing your website, email, and social media analytics, it’s tempting to look at vanity metrics.

 

Big numbers, like “1,000,000 website visits” or “500,000 tweet impressions” can seem impressive. But they might not serve your goals at all. You need to pick the right metrics for your goals.

 

 

Decide what to measure

 

Success will look different for your team depending on whether you’re trying to boost brand awareness, change perceptions, develop new services, or grow your supporter base (to name just a few possible aims).

 

What are your big-picture objectives? How will your digital content get you there? What does success look like for each aspect of your strategy?

 

Zoom in on the metrics that show if you’re moving towards your core aims. Rule out everything else.

 

 

Choose your tools

 

You don’t always need paid software to analyse digital content performance. Twitter,  LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Google Analytics offer excellent insights, all for free.

 

For more powerful analytics, you could invest in social media management or email marketing software, although you may not be able to get retrospective data.

 

 

Gather the data

 

Sit down with your team and explore:

• Social media: Your best and worst-performing posts across all the platforms you use
• Web: Your most and least-visited webpages, visit patterns, visitor demographics, and organic and direct traffic
• Email: Your best and worst-performing emails. You might want to look at open rate, click rate, click-through rate, deliverability rate, unsubscribes, spam reports; some paid software also lets you see time spent viewing email, percentage of read, skimmed or glanced email

 

Choose the right timescales

 

If you only do one thing, review your top-performing content for the whole year. If time allows, review each month individually, as well as looking at specific days and weeks like campaign launches or key awareness days.

 

 

Analyse the data

 

Now it’s time to put your data under the microscope. Block out an hour or two to dive into all the data at once, or try sitting down for short chunks of time to look at social, web, and email separately.

• What’s driving the most and least engagement? How can you expand or maintain your output of the best types and formats of content, on which platforms? Can you abandon the least engaging ones?
• Where is engagement growing and at what rate? Does it correlate to where you’ve put increased time, energy, and money?
• Where is engagement slowing, and at what rate? Why might this be? Are you wasting time, energy or money on these platforms, content types, formats or audiences?
• What’s surprising?
• What’s as expected?
• What data are you still missing? How could you plug those gaps (for example, informal surveys of your social media followers or formal market research)?
• How does the data compare to previous years (if you have it)?

 

Map to the strategy

 

So you’ve picked out trends in the data. But are they the trends you want to see?

 

If you have a formal digital strategy, compare your findings with your strategic objectives. Do they line up? If you don’t have a formal strategy, now’s a great time to use this data, your insights, plus your team’s perception of what is and isn’t practical or desirable, to craft one. You might talk about:

• Did you reach your core audiences, with content that’s useful, useable and engaging?
• Did your content fit the users or personas that you’re targeting? Did you empower them to take relevant actions?
• Did you drive growth in your top-priority audiences, or on platforms where your top-priority audiences spend time?
• Did your content show your brand as you aspire to be? Does it align with your values?

 

Look beyond the content

 

You can’t create great content without the right workflows, roles, skills and learning in place. Ask your team:

• Did you have the right people with the right skills in the right places, to deliver content that moves you towards your goals?
• Did you create great content, but at the expense of people’s wellbeing?
• Did you meet your content goals, but lose time that could have been spent better elsewhere?

Give your team anonymous ways to contribute their reflections, in case people aren’t willing to share publicly.

 

 

Put your insights into action

 

Insights are no good if you don’t act on them. As a team, decide:

• What will you stop doing?
• What will you start doing?
• What are you most proud of?
• Where is the greatest room for improvement?

Now identify what barriers might stand in your way. Consider:

• Do you have the knowledge and skills you need to improve your content?
• Do you have the resources you need, like money, time and energy?
• Do you have the support you need from the wider team?

To overcome those barriers, consider:

• Which other organisations are leading the way? How can you learn from them?
• How can you make the most of your best content? What can you repurpose as an evergreen asset and keep using (at appropriate intervals)?
• What resources are there to help you (like our step-by-step guides to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, creating a digital strategy and appropriate goals, or improving your marketing emails)

 

Set yourself up for success

 

As you make detailed reviews a habit, you’ll get more and more out of them. So make it easy for yourself.

• Was it difficult to get all your digital analytics together? It might be a sign you need to simplify your data
• Set SMART goals
• Commit to a regular practice. Put a date in the diary for your 2022 content review, and start working towards it